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Archive for July, 2007

Working From Home and the GTD

Monday, July 16th, 2007

When you are in the practice of executing under the GTD model, you are to consider the context, time available, energy available and priority when you are in the moment. At the daily level you are doing predefined work, work as is shows up or you are defining your work. ...

How to Easily Monitor your Website Uptime for Free

Monday, July 16th, 2007

Currently, there are a bunch of website monitors available, some are free, but I couldn't find any that was really simple and satisfy our requirements. We wanted a monitor that would connect to our site ThemBid.com every minute, retrieve a pixel image, and notify us if it retrieved something ...

A Simple Graphical Batch File Name Changer for Windows

Sunday, July 15th, 2007

As I was learning Python for fun, I wanted to create a project that would give me a little experience with Windows file manipulation with a graphical front end. I had a problem where I had a bunch of files in a directory where I wanted to change a bunch ...

Using the Decorator Design Pattern to Create a Dynamic Community

Sunday, July 15th, 2007

As ThemBid.com grows, we have received several requests to create communities that use ThemBid.com as the underlying engine, but niched to a certain vertical. Normally we would create this new community using a set of core classes and then an array of sub classes specific to each community. But I ...

Do Math Quickly in Your Head

Saturday, July 14th, 2007

Some time ago a picked up a cool little book called "Short-Cut Math" by Gerard W. Kelly. It's promise was to increase my calculation ability (in my head) up to three times. Following are the tips that stayed with me since I read the book and that I found most ...

The Art of the Start: Getting Back to Basics

Saturday, July 14th, 2007

When I get deep into the design and function aspects of ThemBid.com, it becomes easy to lose focus of the big picture. I had a great conversation with a seasoned veteran of the dot com days and he shared with me the basic concept of Chaos Theory. As you extract ...

Social Networks for Developers

Friday, July 13th, 2007

I was pleasantly surprised when I found over 400 visitors coming from Dzone.com. After checking the site out, I found it to be useful and it earned a spot in my treasured del.icio.us archive. This prompted me to take a look at the active social networks for developers. Following is ...

ThemBid.com Team Gets Recognition for Ruby on Rails Contribution

Friday, July 13th, 2007

An article written by ThemBid.com developer Elmer Thomas, "Using the Digg API with Ruby on Rails" grabs front page news on both Dzone.com and LinuxToday.com.

Let it Rain On My Web 2.0 Startup

Thursday, July 12th, 2007

One of my favorite Sales/Marketing books is "How to Become a Rainmaker: The Rules for Getting and Keeping Customers and Clients" by Jeffrey J. Fox. Following is an adaptation of the Railmaker's Credo for the web 2.0 startup.

Using the Digg API with Ruby on Rails

Thursday, July 12th, 2007

The following tutorial will get you started fast using the Digg API in your Ruby on Rails (RoR) application. I am assuming you already have setup your RoR application.